The recognition of handwriting is today in many aspects a mature research area with several industrial applications. It has become an increasingly popular method for inputting data to data handling units, such as mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). The recognition method is in most cases limited to recognition of single isolated characters, as for example by Graffiti®, manufactured by Palm, Inc.
When it comes to on-line cursive word recognition progress has been much slower. Most such methods of today utilize Neural Networks and statistical models based on Hidden Markov Models. However, extending the task to recognition of cursive words introduces a difficult layer of complexity in the form of segmentation.